Sterling on Turing & gender

Author Bruce Sterling almost never fails to come up with interesting takes on a variety of subjects.  He recently gave a talk on the occasion of the 100 year anniversary of Alan Turing's birth, dealing with the Turing test and more broadly about cognition vs. computation.  Sterling points out that Turing's original description of the imitation test is like this:  "In the original Turing imitation game, you’ve got three entities: a judge, a woman, and a machine pretending to be a woman."  Sterling spins out some ideas around the role of gender in consciousness, in AI, etc.  Definitely worth reading in full, but here are a couple passages of interest to this blog.

You could argue that “masculinity” has nothing to do with "intelligence." I might even agree with you, but if my masculinity isn’t an aspect of my so-called intelligence, what is it?

Mathematics may be sexless, but do we really believe that cognition is some quality we have that is strictly divorced from gender? How can you properly claim that you understand how human brains work, if you can’t create a system that expresses a female sexual identity? Because billions of brains do that every day, and it’s not rare, because women are the majority gender. Where is that aspect of human intelligence supposed to be hiding? Is femininity non-algorithmic? Is femininity a Turing non-computable problem?

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Sexuality is eons older than intelligence. We’re not abstract mathematical systems somehow burdened by gender. We are living entities produced by sexual means. Those are the facts of life.

We don’t yet know how cognition works. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that sexual hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone, are fundamental to cognition and even to conscious self-awareness. We should have a spirit of humble inquiry toward cognition. We know far more about it than we did when we invented body-mind duality, but it’s a large, dark area.

Christian DeQuincey on Consciousness

A few weeks back I was perusing things in a rather New Agey shop in Port Townsend, WA, and came across a book that I decided to pick up.  Christian DeQuincey's Consciousness From Zombies to Angels (2009) is not as frivolous as it may sound - zombies are not only on TV these days, they play an important role in thinking about consciousness (or the lack thereof).  DeQuincey is a philosopher, and he argues that there is just no way that consciousness, or subjectivity, can ever arise from simply physical objects - there's an abiding mystery there of how consciousness could simply emerge of some excessively complex organization of material 'stuff' (such as, for example, our physical bodies with the brain).

So what is he proposing instead?  The basic idea is that some sort of consciousness permeates all physical objects, at all levels - termed panpsychism.  This is admittedly a hard notion to get one's mind around, and  given how hard it is to even get a handle on whether other animals like dolphins have consciousness (or whether some people around us are actually zombies), it's worth pondering.

But let's back up a bit.  What does DeQuincey think consciousness is or is not?  He argues against the idea of consciousness as 'energy' - "let's just realize the simple fact that all forms of energy are spread out in space.  Consciousness, however, doesn't hang out in any kind of space.  You can't see it, touch it, hear it, smell or taste it.  It's just not that kind of thing.  In fact it's not any kind of thing." (p 18) And this distinction causes what he analyzes as the big blind spot of science - that it has made the physical world the focus of all study, and thus has essentially pushed consciousness out of the field of study.

DeQuincey proposes a shift to what he terms 'looking-glass science' where there is a recognition of the role of the scientist's dual role of observer and the observed, a participatory practice - "Consciousness cannot be studied from the outside; it must be viewed from within." (p. 151).  Elsewhere - "Every item of scientific knowledge - the entire edifice of science - exists only because the data was experienced in some scientist's mind." (p. 143).

I liked several things that I found just in flipping through the book in the store.  One factor was that he is much more careful in his use of quantum mechanical ideas than most of the new age writers.  He writes: "It is not the case that the probabilities expressed in the quantum wave function are 'limitless' or represent 'unlimited potential.' The matrix of possibilities expressed in the mathematics of wave mechanics is a limited set of options, and the collapse of the wave function on observation brings one of those options into actuality" (p. 102).

Many may find DeQuincey's work insufferably new age and non-science, but I believe he does pinpoint some key problems in the overall (neuro-)scientific approach to study of consciousness and the mind from the outside via observations of the brain (which still must rely on subjective reports of corresponding experience).

Psychology and Neuroscience - Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

The Edge 370 features Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, who studies adolescent brain development.  The overall news on neuroplasticity is good:

The idea that the brain is somehow fixed in early childhood, which was an idea that was very strongly believed up until fairly recently, is completely wrong. There's no evidence that the brain is somehow set and can't change after early childhood. In fact, it goes through this very large development throughout adolescence and right into the 20s and 30s, and even after that it's plastic forever, the plasticity is a baseline state, no matter how old you are. That has implications for things like intervention programs and educational programs for teenagers.

But I found this passage quite revealing:

One interesting thing to think about, when you're thinking about brain imaging, is why is brain imaging important? What does it teach us that we didn't already know from psychology studies? This is a really important question that a lot of people are asking. Why does it matter that we know that one part of the brain is involved with a process? Why does that matter more than just knowing about this process from a kind of psychological point of view? For example, if you know that one method of teaching works better than another method of teaching, so one method of memory rehearsal worked better than another method, why does knowing that the hippocampus is more involved in one than the other? Why is that useful? Does it tell you any more than you already knew from the psychology results or the education result? I think this is a very open question and often, actually, especially when you're talking about the implications of neuroscience for education, actually, often it's the case that is sort of seduced by these brain images, and we see them and they are very tangible and people suddenly think, "Oh, my God, it has a biological basis," and they somehow seem more convincing and attractive than just pure psychology results. But often they don't really tell us anything more.

This raises the issue that brain imaging itself is not really revealing much without the component of the subjective experience (or at least some sort of behavioral evaluation).  Psychology, and understanding of the subjective experience obviously still matters!

Brain Wars - by Mario Beauregard (2012)

Brain Wars is a fairly light review of findings battling against the reductionist, materialist view that all the 'mind-stuff' is illusion, nothing more than neurons firing.  Just 214 pages of text, it's an easy read, and I suppose it does a reasonable job of pointing out various scientific findings that indicate that one's thoughts, intentions and beliefs can have an impact on the brain and body.  There are chapters on neurofeedback, neuroplasticity, hypnosis, psi, near-death and mystical experiences among others.  In the conclusion Beauregard suddenly brings up quantum mechanics and nonlocality as a scientific basis for reconsideration of consciousness, which I found to be trivializing and a bit of a tease.

Anyone who has read much in the field will likely find little new information here, but it may be a good introduction for newcomers to this question of the role of mind.

Eagleman on the downloading question

Found this entry on David Eagleman's blog (associated with his book Incognito): Silicon Immortality: Downloading Consciousness into Computers.  He writes:

We are on a crash-course, however, with technologies that let us store unthinkable amounts of data and run gargantuan simulations. Therefore, well before we understand how brains work, we will find ourselves able to digitally copy the brain's structure and able to download the conscious mind into a computer. 

If the computational hypothesis of brain function is correct, it suggests that an exact replica of your brain will hold your memories, will act and think and feel the way you do, and will experience your consciousness — irrespective of whether it's built out of biological cells, Tinkertoys, or zeros and ones.

I've got a few quibbles with this.

1.  It sounds to me like the project is about recreating brain structures in computers.  Whether this computer, when operating, has what any of us think of as consciousness, is pretty tough to confirm (given that we can't really confirm it with other people today).
2. He claims 'immortality' - but this digital simulation is not the same as current embodied self.  Even if we assume it is a 'conscious being' with all of our memories (as of some point of download, I guess), it is now on a separate path, and it is a separate being.  Perhaps other people might think of it as being very much like the original person, but its conscious experience is now on a new path.
3.  The usual equivalence of "brain structure" and "conscious mind" erases all the distinctions I'm interested in!

What does meditation do to the brain?

New York Times article - "In Sitting Still a Bench Press for the Brain" by John Hanc ran on May 9 2012.  It's a short report on some basically inconclusive studies looking at the physical impacts of meditation, including one published in February, conducted by UCLA and led by Dr. Eileen Luders.

A striking finding of the study was that the degree of cortical gyrification appeared to increase as the number of years practicing meditation increased. 

“We used to believe that when you were born, your brain would grow and reach a peak in the early 20s and then start shrinking,” Dr. Luders said. “It was thought there was nothing we could do to change that.” Her research suggests that there might be. As a meditator for four years, Dr. Luders understands the degree of mental discipline involved. “People ask, ‘What do you do? Just sit there with your eyes closed?’ It’s actually hard work, because you have to make a constant mental effort.”

The brain... It makes you think. Doesn't it?

The UK Guardian ran a nice little debate between David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis on the role of the brain and the unconscious processes in our behavior (April 28 2012). Eagleman is a neuroscientist interested in the neural correlates of mental activity (and author of Incognito), and Tallis is a professor of medicine who challenges just how truly important the unconscious processing really is. I think it sums up the debate pretty well. While I side closer to Tallis, I think his style is a little obnoxious, and Eagleman keeps it polite. Here's a bit of it:

Eagleman -A person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state. As a consequence, people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection. To know ourselves increasingly requires careful studies of the neural substrate of which we are composed.

Tallis: Some of what you have just said sounds like common sense and a retreat from the radical thesis advanced in Incognito. There you put unconscious brain mechanisms in the driving seat – which is why your book has attracted such attention – and argue that important life decisions are strongly influenced by "the covert machinery of the unconscious".

Even when you concede in Incognito that "consciousness is the long-term planner", you still can't let go of the idea of the largely unconscious brain being in charge. This is because you want to privilege brain science. Your case is assisted by personifying the brain, as when you say things like "the brain cares about social interaction".

Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite - Robert Kurzban (2010)

Robert Kurzban is associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and his 2010 book entitled Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite is a view of the modular theory of mind.  The basic idea is that the forces of natural selection have resulted in humans having a brain that supports a variety of functions, which are not necessarily united or made consistent.  Kurzban writes: "A module is an information-processing mechanism that is specialized to perform some function."  They key is that the modules are not all sharing information with each other, which throws into question the notion of a singular "you".

As a simple example of this notion, he cites various optical illusions, such as one where lines with different arrow point endings appear to be of different lengths, but are actually the same - our perceptions 'tell' us one thing about what we're seeing, while we can 'know' via measurements what the situation actually is. There are a variety of modules which serve different purposes, and the claim is that these modules are acting essentially independently at least in some circumstances.  That in some ways is not so different from what we may be used to from discussion of the conscious mind and the unconscious.

This view of mind leads Kurzban to question the notion of the unitary 'self' - and thus there are many passages along these lines:

It's often appealing to talk about what "I" "believe," or what "you" "believe" - and , in real life, it's often good enough.  But when you're trying to figure out how the mind works, it's important to think about modules, even when making seemingly simple claims that Person X believes p.(p. 72)

He covers a number of different experiments and findings to support this modular view - and one of the key ideas is that context matters in how we process various situations.  For instance, it is very difficult to support the notion that people have fully rational and describable preferences - they seem to vary based on the context of the choice, such as whether it's known to the chooser that other people are involved and that the choice will be known by those others.

Relating things to the title of the book, the concept is that the various modules may have functional reasons for having contradictory 'views' - and if the information is never brought into one resolved view, then we all have various tendencies toward hypocrisy.  Depending on the situation and context, different functional aspects may come to the fore.

Kurzban introduces the notion of the 'press secretary' module of mind - that which communicates to others.  Extending the metaphor, it is often good for the press secretary to be unaware of certain activities, so that no falsehood is given and strategic goals are advanced - and this is tied into some evolutionary arguments of why this may have developed.

Overall I found this to be quite an interesting take on the subject.  But I do have my quibbles.  For one, Kurzban seems to equate 'mind' and 'brain' - and I believe this erases some very important distinctions.  I see mind as an experiential concept - one which may be 'hosted' in the brain, but is not itself aware of all the inner workings of that brain.  So when Kurzban writes things like "I'm not going to talk at any length about where putative modules are, physically, in the mind" (p. 47), I think the reference should be to the brain, a physical object.  And I believe the mind is what provides enough stability and consistency to our experience and our presentation of ourselves to other people for the concept of a 'self' to be important.  Which is not to say our conscious experience is aware of all the modular functions going on in the brain - indeed we are blissfully unaware of much of the goings-on in the brain.

I saw that he includes a note on his use of the word 'design' in terms of brain functions:  "Some people don't like the word "design" to be used in the way that I am using it here.  As the material in this chapter should make clear, I intend no consciousness or intention when I use the word." (p. 224).  I can't help feeling that the word 'design' implies a designer and an intention (as well as the potential for designed things to be used in ways they were not designed for), so I am one of those people who don't like its use in this way.  I think it would be sufficient to talk about functional aspects of modules that evolved however they evolved.